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Look Here's America Part Two

Haruki Murakami on Salinger, The Great Gatsby, and why American readers sometimes miss the point.
Interview by: Roland Kelts


RK: When you first talked to me about translating The Catcher in the Rye, one of the things you mentioned was a tension in the book, between an open world--democratic and free and pluralistic--and a closed world, controlled and manipulated and oppressive.

HM: Yes. And these days, the closed worlds are getting stronger in many places. You have fundamentalists, cults, and militaries. But you can't destroy closed worlds with arms. Their systems will still survive. For example, you could kill all the al Qaeda soldiers, but the closed system itself, the ideas, would survive. They'll just move it somewhere else. The best thing you can do is just show and tell: Show the good side of the open world. It takes a long time, but in the long term, those open circuits of the open world will outlast the closed worlds.

This was taken from A Public Space, a brand spanking new literary journal that is more than worth checking out.